President Trump said Wednesday he would have had a “very nasty life” if he lost the presidential election, a surprisingly public acknowledgment that his legal challenges could have consumed his life and brought jail time.
“If I lost, it would have been very bad,” Mr. Trump said at an investment summit in Miami Beach. “It was dangerous, actually very dangerous.”
When Mr. Trump won in November, the Justice Department abandoned the two federal cases against him, and a judge in Manhattan issued an unconditional discharge in his hush money case.
Mr. Trump gave voice to something that his advisers had long said he had in the back of his mind as he campaigned. But he did not publicly acknowledge throughout 2024 that he was campaigning for his freedom as much as for the White House itself.
The president made the comments in response to a question about how he would spend a year if granted a sabbatical. Mr. Trump did not directly answer the question, saying he was honored to be president. But he said it took “a certain amount of courage” to run again because of the personal risks.
Mr. Trump also said he disagreed with historians’ assessment that Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated, were the two most mistreated presidents.
“Nobody was treated like me,” he said. “Nobody, and I will tell you, you learn a lot about yourself, but there’s nothing I’d rather do.”
During the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump faced dozens of criminal charges across four different cases. Jack Smith, who served as a special counsel, charged him in two different cases, one related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and another related to his handling of classified government documents after he left the White House in 2021. The documents case had been dismissed by a Trump-appointed judge, but Mr. Smith’s team was appealing it.
He also faced charges in Georgia over attempts to overturn his election loss in 2020, and he was found guilty on all counts in the hush-money case in New York, where he could have faced up to four years in prison.
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.
